In Rodriguez Arbitration, Two Sides Play Hardball

Alex Rodriguez and his lawyer Joe Tacopina, left, arrived for a hearing in September.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

A trainer for Alex Rodriguez was shopping in Times Square with his wife and three young children one recent Saturday when he was followed into Toys “R” Us. A man working on behalf of Major League Baseball approached and handed him some paperwork. It was a subpoena to testify against Mr. Rodriguez.

Investigators working for Mr. Rodriguez, meanwhile, had a target of their own. They had received a tip that Robert D. Manfred, the league’s second-in-command behind Commissioner Bud Selig, had apparently been speaking indiscreetly about Mr. Rodriguez during a round of golf at Manhattan Woods Golf Club in West Nyack, N.Y. Enticed by the lead, Mr. Rodriguez’s investigators tracked down a caddie to learn what Mr. Manfred had said.

In the nine months since Mr. Rodriguez and more than a dozen other players were linked to a South Florida anti-aging clinic that is believed to have distributed banned substances to professional athletes, baseball officials and the Yankee third baseman have engaged in a cloak-and-dagger struggle surpassing anything the sport has seen. The extraordinary investigative tactics, playing out in multiple locations, reflect Major League Baseball’s resolve to prove one of its stars cheated, and that player’s determination to discredit baseball officials.

Witnesses for both sides in the pending arbitration proceedings claim to have been harassed and threatened. Some were paid tens of thousands of dollars for their cooperation. One said she became intimately involved with an investigator on the case. And some witness accounts have shifted, leaving each side scrambling to defend the sometimes inconsistent stories provided by former employees and associates of the now-defunct clinic, Biogenesis of America.

The dispute — which involves lawsuits in Florida and in New York, and a battle over grand jury transcripts in Buffalo — has become so extensive that Major League Baseball has once again turned to its go-to consultant for complicated problems, the former senator George J. Mitchell, whose law firm is assisting with the growing caseload.

These details have been gleaned from dozens of interviews conducted by The New York Times over several months with witnesses, current and former law enforcement officials and lawyers involved in all sides of the dispute, and from documents obtained by The Times relating to M.L.B.’s case against Mr. Rodriguez, as well as police reports and lawsuits. Several witnesses and lawyers insisted on anonymity when discussing any aspect of the case because they have been ordered not to speak about the matter by the independent arbitrator who is hearing Mr. Rodriguez’s appeal of his 211-game doping suspension stemming from the Florida clinic investigation.

What is driving the battle on one side is a scorned player desperately trying to expose a process he considers unfair to him. On the other side are baseball officials who believe Mr. Rodriguez has been getting away with doping violations for years. According to people involved with baseball’s antidoping program, he failed a drug test for stimulants in 2006, a previously undisclosed charge.

Mr. Rodriguez’s formal appeal, which is being heard in a confidential arbitration proceeding, is on break until Nov. 18.

The ferocity of the fight reflects a personal stake for the main protagonists.

Mr. Selig, 79, plans to retire at the end of next season, with his legacy in the balance. In his 21 years leading Major League Baseball, he has been criticized for failing to confront rampant doping. In his later years, has pushed aggressively against drug cheaters.

“Our Biogenesis investigation led to 13 players being disciplined without challenge,” Mr. Selig said Sunday. “Only one player challenged and attacked every part of the process, and I believe it says more about his misconduct than it does about any alleged behavior by our investigators.”

Mr. Rodriguez, 38, who said he used performance-enhancing drugs only from 2001 to 2003, when there were no penalties, is battling for his reputation and his $275 million contract with the Yankees that runs through 2017.

A representative for Mr. Rodriguez’s legal team, Lanny J. Davis, said M.L.B.’s handling of the investigation “is not just unseemly, it is shameful.” He accused the league of using “improper investigative tactics.”

The weekly newspaper Miami New Times reported in January that it had obtained a cache of documents apparently showing that Mr. Rodriguez and other players had received banned substances from Anthony P. Bosch, the head of Biogenesis, in Coral Gables, Fla.

For the investigative arm of Major League Baseball, the article set off a far-flung hunt for copies of the clinic’s records and a chase to get the cooperation of Mr. Bosch and anyone else who might have known about M.L.B. players receiving treatment from Biogenesis.

Working at that time without leverage like subpoena power, baseball’s investigators hit dead ends. Mr. Selig, growing frustrated, decided to hire a second team of private investigators — without telling M.L.B.’s in-house investigative unit, according to baseball officials.

The move by Mr. Selig seemed to highlight his determination to expose Mr. Rodriguez and the other players tied to the clinic. Publicly and in the arbitration, M.L.B. officials have said Mr. Rodriguez’s use of performance-enhancing drugs has been “longer and more pervasive than any other player.”

While it is not clear whether M.L.B. has used it as evidence during the proceeding, Mr. Rodriguez tested positive for a banned stimulant in 2006, according to two people involved with baseball’s collectively bargained drug-testing program. He was not publicly identified for the positive test because players face suspensions for prohibited stimulants only if they test positive more than once.

Lawyers for Mr. Rodriguez, through Mr. Davis, added that M.L.B.’s case against him was flawed. They said that Mr. Selig’s sense of urgency made their client the target of a witch hunt and prompted M.L.B.’s investigators to act recklessly.

Thirteen players who had ties to the clinic have accepted suspensions of at least 50 games.

Mr. Rodriguez is the only player who has fought the suspensions and taken his case to arbitration. His lawyers have assailed the tactics of M.L.B., laying out many of their allegations in a lawsuit filed in New York against the league and Mr. Selig.

Outside the arbitration hearings at M.L.B. headquarters on Park Avenue, supporters of Mr. Rodriguez — organized by a nonprofit called Hispanics Across America — have picketed in protest of what they say is unjust treatment of him by the league.

The organization received a $100,000 donation, according to its president, Fernando Mateo, a local businessman who has been a longtime activist in the city. The contribution, Mr. Mateo said, arrived anonymously with a stipulation: The money had to be used to raise public awareness about Mr. Rodriguez’s fight. Mr. Mateo said his group placed a full-page ad — costing about $106,000 — in The New York Times last month that criticized M.L.B.’s handling of Mr. Rodriguez’s case.

Mr. Rodriguez and his associates had nothing to do with the donation, a spokesman, Ron Berkowitz, said.

First Sign of Problems

Baseball’s investigative methods changed when Mr. Mitchell, working for M.L.B., delivered a critical report in December 2007 on performance-enhancing drugs in the sport. He recommended that the commissioner’s office create a new investigative department to look into doping accusations. A month after the release of the report, Mr. Selig announced that he had formed an investigations unit, headed by Daniel T. Mullin, a 23-year veteran of the New York Police Department.

One of the most vexing issues investigators confronted was doping. Mr. Selig bore the brunt of criticism from the news media and Congress that team owners had ignored the obvious influx of performance-enhancing drugs into baseball. The sentiment infuriated Mr. Selig because he believed it should have been directed at the players union, which had long opposed drug testing.

By 2009, Mr. Rodriguez was on track to break Barry Bonds’s career home run record within seven years. The pursuit of the record would be important to Mr. Selig, serving as evidence that the game had moved beyond the doping era, headlined by Mr. Bonds’s fall from stardom.

That February, however, Mr. Rodriguez’s image was shattered when Sports Illustrated reported that he had been among the roughly 100 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, when testing results were kept private.

Another front in M.L.B.’s pursuit of Mr. Rodriguez opened later in 2009, when Anthony Galea, a Toronto doctor who had worked with professional athletes, came under federal investigation for distributing banned substances in Canada and the United States. Mr. Rodriguez eventually said he was treated by Dr. Galea, but insisted that he did not receive any banned substances.

Nearly four years later, as M.L.B. investigates the Biogenesis case, its lawyers are petitioning a federal judge in Buffalo to release Mr. Rodriguez’s grand jury testimony in the Galea case, which they hope will give them more ammunition in arbitration.

In May 2013, M.L.B. investigators showed up unannounced at the Dominican Republic home of Bruli Medina Reyes, a trainer for Mr. Rodriguez and other players.

They wanted to talk with him about his clients and their connections to Biogenesis.

Mr. Reyes, in a phone interview with The Times, said the investigators pressured him to answer their questions by telling him that others who had not been forthcoming had faced “federal cases” and by threatening to limit his future opportunities to work with M.L.B. players.

A few weeks later, M.L.B. flew Mr. Reyes, 37, to New York, where he spent about nine hours meeting with baseball officials. Mr. Reyes said he was given paperwork indicating he had witnessed Mr. Rodriguez being injected with performance-enhancing drugs.

“I told them I knew nothing about that,” Mr. Reyes said in the interview, which was arranged by his lawyer, Roberto Cuan.

Mr. Reyes said that even though he denied seeing Mr. Rodriguez being injected, he was asked to sign two documents, provided in English and Spanish. He said he signed them without fully reading them.

Baseball officials challenge Mr. Reyes’s account of the events. “Medina affirmed the contents of his affidavit on numerous occasions in the presence of at least six M.L.B. attorneys or investigators, and had the affidavit read to him line by line in Spanish,” said Pat Courtney, an M.L.B. spokesman.

Over the next several months, M.L.B. investigators kept tabs on Mr. Reyes, visiting him in Toronto, phoning him in Tampa and visiting him again in the Dominican Republic. In September, they brought him back to New York and paid for his wife and children to accompany him.

Photo

THE WITNESS Anthony Bosch, who headed a Florida anti-aging clinic, is at the center of baseball’s case against Alex Rodriguez.Credit
Fitzpatrick Communications, via Associated Press

It was during this visit that Mr. Reyes’s relationship with M.L.B. became contentious, he said. Investigators showed him affidavits bearing his signature that stated he had seen someone injecting Mr. Rodriguez.

At the same time, Mr. Reyes said, he learned that M.L.B. expected him to testify at Mr. Rodriguez’s arbitration.

Mr. Reyes said he was concerned that M.L.B. would continue to follow him, prompting him to leave his hotel, where the league had booked a room for him and his family, and relocate to another hotel in Manhattan.

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A month later, after Mr. Reyes had been served the subpoena at the Times Square toy store, he was back on Park Avenue to testify in the arbitration. He declined to discuss what he said during the hearing, but documents show he testified that he had felt pressured to sign affidavits prepared by M.L.B. about Mr. Rodriguez receiving performance-enhancing drugs.

Baseball officials, however, say that Reyes’s latest description of events is inaccurate, and that his claims of being pressured by M.L.B. are not credible. They say they remain convinced that Mr. Reyes understood the statements that were included in the documents he signed. Mr. Courtney said that two days after M.L.B. provided a copy of Mr. Reyes’s affidavit to Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, the league was contacted by a lawyer for Mr. Reyes. The lawyer told M.L.B. that Mr. Reyes would no longer cooperate with its investigation, Mr. Courtney said.

The Nurse

In the arbitration, Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers have seized on the story of Mr. Reyes, as well as those of other witnesses, to try to cast M.L.B. investigators as unethical and willing to go to extremes to get information.

A lawyer for Loraine Delgadillo, a nurse who worked for Mr. Bosch at Biogenesis, recounted how her client became intimately involved with an M.L.B. investigator. The lawyer, Stefanie Moon, said in a phone interview that Ms. Delgadillo had provided representatives for Mr. Rodriguez with an affidavit about the relationship.

Ms. Moon said that in the affidavit, Ms. Delgadillo recounted visits by M.L.B. investigators to her Miami home in February. On Valentine’s Day, Mr. Mullin, the investigations unit chief who had interviewed Ms. Delgadillo, sent a bouquet of flowers to her home with a note thanking her for her help. When Ms. Delgadillo called Mr. Mullin to thank him, he offered to take her to dinner during his next visit.

Over the following weeks, Ms. Moon said, Mr. Mullin met with Ms. Delgadillo three times, treating her to dinners and drinks at Town Kitchen and Bar and Akashi Japanese Restaurant, and a meal at Big Pink in South Beach.

Ms. Moon said that Ms. Delgadillo said in the affidavit that she and Mr. Mullin became intimate, and he spent the night at her home.

Mr. Mullin, through M.L.B., denied that he had an inappropriate relationship with Ms. Delgadillo, an allegation that was also included in Mr. Rodriguez’s lawsuit against the league. Ms. Moon said her client accepted $100,000 from Mr. Rodriguez’s representatives in exchange for the card signed by Mr. Mullin that came with the flowers, his business card and access to her phone for text messages.

Ms. Moon said Ms. Delgadillo told the M.L.B. investigators in February that she had “no firsthand knowledge about Major League Baseball players being treated by Biogenesis.”

Photo

THE PLAYER Alex Rodriguez during the 2009 World Series. Rodriguez excelled in the playoffs that year, but his image suffered when Sports Illustrated said he had failed a drug test years earlier.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Money for Documents

Since the earliest days of the investigation, money has been used by both sides to acquire information. The propriety of paying for documents is not addressed in baseball’s collective bargaining agreement, but the chain of custody of some key documents that M.L.B. is using to build its case is under scrutiny.

A March 24 police report in Boca Raton, Fla., revealed that a car had been broken into and client records from Biogenesis were stolen from the vehicle. Among the people the police interviewed was a man named Gary Jones, who told them in mid-April that he did not steal the records and that he had not been in touch with M.L.B. about them, according to the police report.

Around the same time that the car was broken into, Mr. Mullin, on behalf of M.L.B., bought two batches of Biogenesis files from Mr. Jones. The men met twice at the Cosmos Diner in Pompano Beach to exchange the clinic’s records for cash. Baseball officials said that they paid Mr. Jones a total of $125,000 for the two sets of records.

Both men brought people along to video one of the meetings — and later, Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers paid $200,000 for a copy, according to people briefed on the matter.

Records from the case show that Mr. Jones said that he told Mr. Mullin that the first collection of documents had been stolen from Biogenesis by an employee, and that the second had been taken from the car.

Mr. Courtney, the spokesman for Major League Baseball, said the league officials did not know about the police report when they purchased the documents and Mr. Jones did not tell them they were stolen.

In a text message on Sunday, Mr. Jones declined to comment for this story.

One of the questions that has persisted in the case is whether Mr. Bosch, the key witness for M.L.B., has been paid for his cooperation. Mr. Bosch, through a spokeswoman, Joyce Fitzpatrick, said he had not received cash payments from M.L.B.

Mr. Bosch, who is being investigated by federal authorities, initially disputed reports that he had prescribed performance-enhancing drugs to M.L.B. players. Ms. Fitzpatrick said that a representative for Mr. Rodriguez had sent a $25,000 retainer in February to a lawyer for Mr. Bosch for his legal representation.

Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers, through Mr. Davis, said that at the time of the payment Mr. Rodriguez thought it was “the fair and responsible thing to do since Bosch seemed to be incurring these fees as a result of allegations against” the player.

In early June, though, Mr. Bosch began cooperating with M.L.B.’s investigation.

According to lawyers involved with the case, two factors ultimately led Mr. Bosch to cooperate: a lawsuit Major League Baseball filed against him in March and concerns about his personal security.

“Despite serious threats to his life from those who want him to stay silent, Mr. Bosch feels it is better to tell the truth than to hide from it,” Ms. Fitzpatrick said in an email.

Mr. Rodriguez said through a spokesman that he and his associates had no knowledge of threats to Mr. Bosch.

Photo

THE SUPPORTERS Protesters outside Major League Baseball offices during a hearing in the Alex Rodriguez arbitration. The group Hispanics Across America said it received an anonymous $100,000 contribution to be used in support of Rodriguez.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

M.L.B.’s lawsuit, which was filed in Florida state court, alleged that Mr. Bosch and others at the clinic had damaged the sport by providing players with banned drugs.

The move gave the league’s investigators tools they had never had: the power to subpoena witnesses and documents, as well as something even more powerful — the ability to drop defendants in the lawsuit if they agreed to cooperate.

Shortly after Mr. Bosch appeared on ESPN in April to deny that he gave players drugs, his lawyer called Mr. Manfred and said Mr. Bosch wanted to make a deal with the league. The next day Mr. Manfred and baseball’s top labor lawyer, Dan Halem, flew to Miami from New York.

Sitting at a picnic table with his lawyers and the baseball officials, Mr. Bosch said that he was willing to cooperate because he believed he needed security and could not afford to protect himself. In exchange for his cooperation, baseball agreed to drop the suit against Mr. Bosch and pay for full-time protection.

If Mr. Bosch helped its case against Mr. Rodriguez, M.L.B. said, it would tell the United States Department of Justice about the assistance he was providing, as well as cover his legal and travel expenses, and indemnify him from lawsuits by players.

Documents show that M.L.B. also agreed to pay for Mr. Bosch’s security, at a rate of up to $2,400 a day.

Yet, once the league had Mr. Bosch’s cooperation, the intensity of each side’s investigations hardly diminished.

About five months later, around the time Mr. Rodriguez was beginning his appeal at arbitration, Mr. Manfred played a round of golf in Rockland County, shooting an 82 and beating his son and another M.L.B. executive. A former employee of Manhattan Woods Golf Club who was not at the course that day emailed a tip to a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez, saying Mr. Manfred had been talking openly about Mr. Rodriguez’s case.

The investigators quickly caught up with Jason Firestone, the caddie who had been with Mr. Manfred. Mr. Firestone said they told him that if he did not cooperate, “the golf course was going to go under.”

“They kept calling me, telling me they were going to ruin my life,” Mr. Firestone said about his conversations with the investigators.

The former employee who submitted the original tip then reached out to Mr. Rodriguez’s representatives again. He explained that he was a fan of the Yankees and Mr. Rodriguez, and had fabricated the story.